Furnace fun

Ok so I could be accused of being biased here, but we set Furnace to be the ultimate small RPG con and this year it really sunk with me in that we had reached our goals and we are here to stay. The only bad bit for me is that the whole experience whizzed past me.

I’d personally like to thank the Collective Endeavour: Iain, Neil and Andy for setting up shop once again. Every year you guys keep on getting more and more professional and it showed. There was a good selection of games being run and on offer. I was chuffed to bits that Duty and Honour sold out bar one copy 🙂

My own Furnace experience was a bit hectic, but I think this year I’ve learnt to chill out and enjoy the fruits of my labours.

Partially to promote Hearts in Glorantha but mainly to have fun we had a Gloranthan games track where we had three gms running easily accessible Gloranthan games of various systems – a simple homebrew, SimpleQuest and HeroQuest 2. We filled all but the last Sunday game – which fell victim to the fact about twenty people left after lunch to go home.

I took time out from running to play in the same Saturday night game of Reign as Tim. The Gm was on the ball and once I got my head round the setting (which is deliberately weird) I got into the narrative. Less certain about the rules system which involved rolling large numbers of d10 and making groups of dice. It struck me as a bit too random, my character nearly got killed by a herd of demon possessed cows because even though I was throwing 7 or 8 dice and not making a single pair!!

As Neil already said in his report I also ran Monkey on Sunday afternoon – a game which the players really made fun (Monkey to my delight is very player centred 🙂 ) and Neil and his mate Andy provided some really good feedback for after.

Room D101 was less focused than at Continuum, but Neil and Ginger Matt ran a game of SimpleQuest and Monkey respectively, but I did have a table set aside for selling HiG and the ‘Cheeky Monkey’ version of Monkey inbetween sessions. Final scores on the doors three Cheeky Monkeys (to people who played in the games) to seven HiG (one of which was sold to player, six went to Jim at Patriot Games). Next year will probably be a big one for D101 at Furnace since we’ll have more books out by then – at least three issues of HiG, SimpleQuest + one supplement (which is going to be Duel stated with Wordplay) and off course the one everyone is waiting for Monkey!

As usual lots of ideas came whizzing through my brain as a result of thinking where to next and from chats I had with various folk at the con, which I’ll go through the more concrete ideas in a seperate post.

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3 thoughts on “Furnace fun”

Once again I was proud to be part of the D101 team and had a brilliant weekend. Next time I’ll maybe stick to running games in slots 2, 3 and 4 to avoid player shortage, though to be honest, as long as all the players had a good time I really didn’t mind my games not running. Heck, I finally got to experience Monkey, which was most fun.

As I quickly outlined at the end of the con, since this is D101’s last con for the foreseeable future (I have vague plans of going to Games Expo in June/July?) I’m going to take time out to write some proper demo games for both Monkey and SimpleQuest (which has suffered quite badly in the past; can you say all scenarios too long???) which are properly tested, with lovely handouts and maps.

Reckon I’ve got six months to do this and I’ll get you and Ginger involved in the process. No more handing you the scenario + characters on the day, with missing mappage!

Thanks for performing heroically and making sure the players had a good time (which is the important thing and why D101 exists).